Has anyone tried Audible e-books on the empeg? I guess they need special software to play them back. But, can they be converted to MP3 somehow?

Attack of the FAQ.

Also, Audible allows burning to CD. Roundabout way of doing it, but should work.

Sometimes the burn-then-rerip method is faster than Total Recorder. Because sometimes with total recorder you have to do it in 1:1 real time, but burning and ripping can be faster.

Could one burn it to ISO, then mount the ISO in a virtual CD drive and rip from there?

I've seen similar tricks done, yes.

http://www.audible.com/
"Listen to a Best Seller on your iPod or MP3 player!"

Doesn't sound like anything special to me. What sort of sound file are they using?

I was going on the statement, "I guess they need special software to play them back" and assuming it was still true. Once upon a time, it was true. Perhaps they've changed.

They haven't. It's just that pretty much every mass market player supports their format in some way or another.

Ah. So if it's not regular MP3, i.e., if it's a copy-protected format that happens to be supported by many mass-market players, then it won't play on the Empeg and the above discussion still counts.

Yes. See these people. Their program will simultaneously remove the DRM from the file and transcode it to MP3 using the latest LAME encoder. The speed ranges from 1:1 up to 54x depending on how powerful your hardware is and the nature of your input files. [i.e., a dual-core 3GHz computer with 4 GB RAM running XP with Windows Media Player transcoding 27 input files simultaneously would be the optimum situation and would operate at 54x. My Vista box tops out at 20x]

I can personally attest that this program works as advertised.

tanstaafl.

Thanks Doug!